Not that long ago we had a project that we were working on with a local clothing business we are part of named Boston Knucklehead Clothing. The task at hand was all about building the email newsletter list up a bit. The project was simple; we put out a free sticker pack and in return you were on the company’s list for all future communication efforts. What happened next nobody could have predicted in their wildest marketing dreams. It was like an email marketer’s dream come true.

It started with Twitter

Our first location to start the message occurred on Twitter. This can easily fall into the Twitter success story bucket for those of you who still do not believe in marketing your business online with Twitter. One tweet caused the list of followers to start pushing the tweet around and 48 hours later we had received over 1,000 sticker requests, yes 1,000! I personally had my email account hooked up to this campaign and I had an email every 30 seconds or so for two days straight dropping into my inbox. Emails from every corner of the world came in. Emails from Europe, Central America, China, Japan, Australia, Canada and then some. Our little sticker pack went global almost instantly.

We ran out of stickers. For those of you who never got a pack we are sorry and we will make it up to you as soon as we can. =)

What we learned from this experience

For all those Twitter non-believers social media marketing does work. Does it happen like this every time you try something? no but it does work if you keep at it and try different things. We had an advantage because we were giving away something for free which people love these days. Free items to the right audience can be gold if you position the campaign strategy correctly. The community will make a trade with you or your company if you are willing to give them something back that is worth it to them. The challenge is finding out what that is so it makes business sense for both parties.